What I really said was that it’s inappropriate to label a pianist as “ignorant” of music theory just because they’ve never got around to learning the Nashville Number System. There are several other systems by which music theory can be taught and in turn, applied.

NNS lets you move “Do” wherever you want it, just like shape notes, but so does the Roman numeral system taught by most music colleges. None of these mean squat if the performer doesn’t translate the system into an understanding of why certain chord progressions work well together. All these systems allow you to give names to chords. It doesn’t matter if you learned to say I/V goes to V7 and then to I or if you say the blocky note goes to the triangle shaped note and then to the circle. It’s how the head knowledge is actually applied that counts.

I know many college students who found theory to be their most difficult subject. I approached it formally like math first…equations I could then translate into art. So theory was one of my easier subjects. The point is whether or not players grasp the relationships between chords…not what particular method they used to get there.

By the way, Ben…I’m 90% pretty sure your name is Ben…it’s perfectly fine to call me by name…no need to refer to me as a mysterious “off the wall commenter.” It really doesn’t bother me one bit that you so totally mis-interpreted what I wrote! :o)